NASA Marshall Space Flight Center has selected Phase3D to help demonstrate a "born qualified" approach to metal additive manufacturing, one where flight hardware is qualified continuously as it prints rather than certified after the fact through separate testing. The program will deploy Phase3D's Fringe Inspection and Fringe Qualification software on a large-format EOS M300-4 quad-laser printer, working with an unnamed U.S. aerospace prime and space propulsion manufacturer.
Fringe Inspection projects structured green light across the build plate after each powder layer is spread and again after laser exposure, generating calibrated three-dimensional height measurements rather than simple images. The system is built to catch powder spreading irregularities, recoater blade interactions, layer shifts, melt pool abnormalities, spatter accumulation, delamination and unexpected surface height variation as they happen. Engineers who currently wait months for CT scans and destructive testing to catch a subsurface defect will care that this data arrives layer by layer, during the print itself, not after it.
NASA says qualifying a single metal additively manufactured part for spaceflight can take more than 18 months today, with rejection rates reaching 30 percent on some applications. The program targets topology-optimized Invar 36 brackets representative of structural spaceflight hardware and will capture more than 50,000 build layers, one of the largest in-situ inspection datasets assembled for production-scale qualification research. That data will be correlated against post-build CT scans to set quantitative go/no-go thresholds, work tied to NASA Civil Space Shortfalls 1490 through 1494 and aligned with NASA-STD-6030, NASA-STD-6033 and SAE AMS7032.
"For decades, qualifying a 3D-printed part for spaceflight has meant months of destructive testing and CT scanning, an approach that simply doesn't scale," said Dr. Niall O'Dowd, founder and CEO of Phase3D. "With Fringe Inspection, the part is qualified as it is built. Every powder layer, every weld and every anomaly becomes part of a calibrated, defensible record of quality."
The work builds on earlier Phase3D research with NASA Marshall that found strong correlation between Fringe Inspection measurements and CT-detected porosity, plus separate studies with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory linking layer-wise anomalies to post-build defects. NASA's focus here is spaceflight hardware, but the same bottleneck, expensive post-build inspection slowing production of complex metal parts, also constrains defense, energy and medical device manufacturers pushing additive parts into higher-volume, safety-critical production.
